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Erin Head is the Director of Health Information Management (HIM) and Quality for an acute care hospital in Titusville, FL. She is a renowned speaker on a variety of healthcare and social media topics and currently serves as CCHIIM Commissioner for AHIMA. She is heavily involved in many HIM and HIT initiatives such as information governance, health data analytics, and ICD-10 advocacy. She is active on social media on Twitter @ErinHead_HIM and LinkedIn. Subscribe to Erin's latest HIM Scene posts here.

Healthcare is a high priority for the US Government and as HIM professionals, we know the importance of keeping our fingers on the pulse of issues facing our nation. We must stay current with proposed regulatory changes and those that address the needs of the US healthcare system as they relate to HIM, privacy and security, and Health IT. One issue our nation has struggled with is secure universal identification for citizens. Social security numbers were not originally meant to be secure identifiers yet they have controversially been used as unique identifiers by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for many years.

In our line of work, we see all of the potential negative implications and the important role that patient identification plays in patient safety, HIPAA compliance, and health record accuracy. When patients are not appropriately identified throughout the continuum of care, many issues arise that can lead to misdiagnosing, incomplete information, unnecessary testing, and fraud to name a few. Duplicates and overlays are far too common due to issues matching patient names and dates of birth versus using a universal secure identifier. Sharing information through health information exchange is nearly impossible when patients are registered in multiple systems with different spellings or misidentification.

The HITECH act of 2009 laid the ground work for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to standardize unique health identifiers among other tasks but we have yet to see any real progress on this subject due to federal budget barriers. In response to this, AHIMA sees this as a critical need and has started a petition to the White House to:

“Remove the federal budget ban that prohibits the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from participating in efforts to find a patient identification solution. We support a voluntary patient safety identifier. Accurate patient identification is critical in providing safe care, but the sharing of electronic health information is being compromised because of patient identification issues. Let’s start the conversation and find a solution.”

The campaign is called MyHealthID and looks to have 100,000 signatures on the petition to garner the attention of the US Government. HIM professionals recently took to Washington, DC to visit with Congressmen and Senators from each state to advocate for MyHealthID. The message that “there’s only one you,” hopes to resonate with politicians and make the case that a unique patient identifier is necessary and important to healthcare.

I encourage all healthcare professionals to sign this petition and assist the advocacy efforts toward a unique patient identifier. MyHealthID will not only help with HIM and Health IT initiatives; it will be in the best interest of healthcare consumers nationwide.